Fic: Dobreiner's Law of Triads, Pokemon
Title: Dobreiner's Law of Triads
Fandom: Pokemon (Anna gameverse) -- all 3rd generation games, Ranger
Word Count: 7142
i. Fire. Grass. Water.
Korea Black was one year, two hundred and seventy days old when she fell in love for the first time.
She likes to think she set a record. She certainly couldn't say she had been aware she was falling in love while it had been happening; even now, the idea is still a little bit abstract, floating just outside her consciousness like a Hoppip on a spring breeze. She understands the concept, of course, but seeing as she never expected to run into it herself at any point, she hadn't spent her formative years studying very hard on the subject of love, re: falling in.
It must be skeptically remarked upon -- and Korea is nothing if she is not a skeptic -- that how could she fall in love at such a tender age, when love is a delicacy reserved only for the long legs and hunched shoulders of the curdled, pasteurized teenage years. Indeed, she doesn't remember the occurrence very well; only vague shapes and the memory of a face, of a voice, and even now, the feel of it passing over her mind is not unlike that of a favorite blanket or the touch of a beloved's Pokemon.
She flows back to that memory the way she does to particular rooms in this house they built; a day and a half's walk from the main road and about forty minutes from the northern fence of the Safari Zone, where Girafarig came to the cross-hatched wire to sniff at her fingers. She hides in the laundry room, perched on top of the dryer, letting it warm the bottom of her thighs while the sun, slanting harsh and beautiful through the Venetian blinds warmed the tops. When that's not enough, she wraps herself in the memory, patchy as it was; she remembers how tense the muscles in Spenser's stomach were against her back as clear as she remembers the smell of Hiro Alfa's house, a strange mix of cinnamon and baby powder, and the unmistakable tang of Pokemon Trainers. She remembers a boy, Hiro's son, two years, two hundred and seventy days old, removing his toothbrush from his mouth and sticking it in hers.
He doesn't share his toothbrush with her anymore, but when Chance Alfa carelessly lets his thigh brush against hers under the table, she loses all train of thought (and for some reason she can't fathom, she thinks this helps her reach an understanding.)
-
Korea would like to state, first and foremost, that she cares nothing for Pokemon. They exist; as long as they tolerate her being in their world, she will tolerate them being in hers. She has no wish to become a Trainer (or a Ranger) and she thinks the idea of there being some deep, psychological connection between Pokemon and humans is ridiculous.
Both of them are empathetic creatures in an apathetic world.
"I don't know. It seems so ... big," she says faintly, letting her wrist flip pathetically as if she couldn't bring herself to make a grander gesture, for all its futility.
Behind her, Maxie grunts, and as usual she can't tell if he's agreeing with her or making fun of her or if he genuinely had something stuck in his throat.
"Legendary Pokemon tend to be, yes," Chance goes wryly, and the next second, he lurches off his Altaria and goes sprinting down the front path, hollering and waving his arms. "Loki! Loki, you dumb, blundering Groudon, get away from my baby's breath!"
She watches him, and even she cannot help but admire the immediate way his Swampert leaps to the smallest shift in his physical presence, how one hand brushing his brown-streaked green hair out of his eyes can mean the difference between his Cacturne lurching into battle or hanging back and letting the Swampert handle it. If she ever came to believe in the connection between people and Pokemon, the flawless way Chance and his team move around each other like Roselia to a trellis would be the leading factor in her conversion.
This man had taken her heart, as brambly and thorny as it was, and stuck it in the middle of the sunlight and here she was, and she needs him like she needs the ebb and flow of her memory.
The Groudon backs off, and Chance turns to her, eyes the same green-yellow of a spring storm, and when he smiles, it's a smile that's just for her, only for her, and she doesn't think there are words to do justice to just how much that means to her.
-
She knows how Maxie looks at her. Like he's sizing her up for something, or like he's calculating just how many ways he can make her crash and burn.
And that's what Maxie is. He's fire and passion. He's dangerous; he's somebody whose face her mother would put on child molestors and 'never take candy from someone who looks like this.'
But Maxie's already tried to destroy the world once (granted, he only had the good of Hoenn in his heart, but what was that saying about the path to hell?) and Korea Black hasn't seen her mother since she was five years old, and that's a story she doesn't particularly want to tell anyone. She thinks Chance knows, but only because his father, Wally, married Korea's sister, Kenya, and when things like that happen, all of a family's bad blood is exposed.
"I couldn't care less," Chance had said flatly when they heard the news. "Love is love is love. I don't judge." Then he had thrown his head back and laughed and laughed and laughed and she didn't want to breathe ever again.
Korea doesn't know whether Chance invited her to come live with him out here because he was obliged to because she was related to him now (well, she always was, but it was cousins once removed kind of thing), or because he loved her, and it hurts more than she thinks it should. (She bets, however, that he did it because she knows this land; she grew up here, in the deepest mountains of Hoenn with Spenser and Aunt Marina and Catherine and Jackson and all the Rangers.)
She hops up onto the island in the middle of the kitchen with its pots and pans swinging from their hooks above her head. She moves a leftover cereal bowl out of the way with her left hand and a sleepy Chimecho away with her right. Her eyes, the same, flashy silver of alloy metal, flicker around the plain, straight-from-a-magazine kitchen design and light upon the small touches that makes it their home like the wings of a Butterfree would touch its prey -- the piled-up dishes, the instant mashed potatoes, Maxie's Mightyena curled up right in the middle of the doorway so it controls all the traffic in and out, its delicate feet twitching in some dream, and Maxie himself, who is perhaps the strangest addition to any household and certainly never came from a magazine.
She thinks of the way Chance's face lights up whenever he's around, and the rings around her ribs tighten just a little bit more.
Maxie still thinks she's competition; he hasn't the faintest idea that she dropped out of the running the moment he turned up on their doorstep, like so many things do in her family.
Still.
Korea Black has never apologized for anything before in her life.
-
She keeps the walk swept smooth, even though there is no paved sidewalk or even much of a porch, because their closest neighbors live more than ten minutes away by Altaria (which is a day and a half's walk).
She thinks the only reason why she takes a broom to that patch of dirt outside their front door every morning is because it's the only way she can feel in charge of their backyard. Which, let's face it, extends on forever. She has no control over the never-ending forest around her; nobody does.
Whoever built Fortree understood it perfectly.
(Also, but this is something she'll never admit out loud, she comes out here and tackles the dirt with a broom because Chance and Maxie are more prone to shows of affection early in the morning, as if making a cup of coffee or rinsing out their breakfast bowls will put up a barrier between them for the rest of the day -- but before that, their lips are free to touch as often as they like, sometimes almost gentle, like lovers, but more often fiercer, like a battle, like one blames the other for where they are, stuck in the middle of nowhere with her.)
So comes the day when she fights the bag of Mightyena food for the broom in the pantry, and she undoes the iron-inlaid locks on the front door with Chance's Minun hanging from her shoulder and swings it open and near about trips over the little red-headed girl sitting on the front dirt with a Pineco-jelly sandwich sticky between her palms.
"Oh. Hello," she says, letting the broom fall to her side where its abused tail catches on the ground and causes it to stand on its own power. The Minun transfers to the other shoulder.
"Hello," the little girl replies, looking at her with eyes the same, flashy silver of metal alloy.
"Who are you?"
"My name is Phoenix. And you're my aunt Korea and you," she looks past her. "Are my brother Chance."
"Hello, little half sister," goes Chance's voice from behind her, sounding jovial and merry because that's how he always sounds, and Korea watches the light come to this little girl's eyes and she wonders how long it will take her to fall in love too. "Did Dad send you here to check on us?"
"No," says Phoenix in that unabashed, honest way of a child. "Your mom and your mom sent me to learn Pokemon from you."
He takes on a bemused tone. "My mother, Hiro Alfa? But she's a Pokemon Master. That's why Dad divorced her and that's why I live out here; I don't want my life to be half the publicity storm hers is. And Marina --" Korea doesn't bother to correct him; what was there to say? Marina isn't actually my mom, she's just the woman who kidnapped me from a home that couldn't love me and taught me everything I know while living hand to mouth in the mountains, while my actual parents are Susanna Alfa and Lance Black of the Elite Four and have only bothered to track me down once and at the same time were raising your dad’s new wife like a little loving family? Mm. No. "-- is a well-renowned Pokemon expert with her own radio show now. Why couldn't they teach you?"
Pheonix shrugs. "They say I have more to teach you than you have to teach me."
"Let me tell you something your uncle Zach taught me," Marina's memory tells her, and Korea is taken back to the ghostly campfires of her youth, her pudgy hands meeting her aunt's in some feeble rendition of patty-cake. "You can be whatever you want to be -- you might think you're destined to be a rock star, but you might wind up a teacher or an artist, and you can do the most amazing things, whatever you decide. But let me tell you this; none of that, none of that compares to the importance of a child's life. You can cure cancer, but if you do not raise your children to be good, and strong, then it means nothing. Do you understand me, Korea? There is no higher responsibility than that of raising a child."
"Would you like something to drink, Phoenix?" she hears herself ask. "We have some apple juice."
The girl shakes her head, her red ringlets flying, the exact same shade of red -- like an Octillery with a fondness for tomatoes -- that Korea had, that Kenya had, that Susanna had and Susanna's father Xavier, patron of the Alfa family, had. "I like orange juice."
"Well, we don't have any of that. But we have a whole forest of orange trees around us, so we can go picking for some the moment you're ready. And if we ask nicely, perhaps Maxie's Camerupt will come with us."
The girl seems to think this over, finishing her sandwich -- except the crust -- in the time it takes her to decide whether she's going to cooperate. But then she makes one huge nod of her head and bounces to her feet.
The broom stands on its own. Korea stands at its side, and Chance stands at hers.
"I love you," he says suddenly, watching the timid but bright-eyed, eager, curious way that Phoenix introduced herself to Maxie's Camerupt while its Trainer looked on, bleary-eyed from sleep and rather confused. She feels his fingers, brushing against her shoulder blades as he gingerly detaches Olivia the Minun's claws from her clothing. "I don't think I ever told you."
She looks up at him through the fan of her eyelashes, and there's a loose feeling in her chest like a whole bucket of water had suddenly gotten loose, and hope sloshes up against her ribs.
ii. Psychic, Dark, Fighting.
"You're clueless as to where you are, aren't you?" the Aqua Grunt tossed her Pokeball from one hand to another like a drunk man would his knife at a bar fight, all flash and raw talent. "Fluster out the enemy, then lower the boom! That's our plan."
"Really?" Kishi grinned, lips peeling back like flakes of sunburned skin from dark cinnamon shoulders, fingers expertly removing his Grumpig's Pokeball from his belt. "I'm just touched that we present that much of a threat to you." And, laughing at the expression on her face, which told him everything like he could read her mind, he threw the Pokeball.
-
Later, they cling to the chalky white rock at the base of the Sootopolis mountain, and there's a whole story about how they got there, but it's one of those kinds of stories that only really gets told by eyewitnesses and they usually get it wrong anyway.
"I don't suppose anyone has any food," Kishi asks, planting his feet into the crystal and shifting a little bit so that the blood could flow back to his butt. He has decided, in the past forty-eight hours, that he really is a land-favoring kind of man. What he wouldn't give to be back in Lavaridge Town, with a desert just a day's walk away and not a concern in the world but training his team. He was happy there, him and his Swampert and his Flygon; the desert didn't bother them; it was just wind and sand and heartless sun.
The sea was its sister, and he hated it most passionately.
Ari shakes his head no.
"I have ..." Shaanxi pulled her bag onto her rock with her from where it had been dangerously close to the approaching tide, and she digs so far deep down that Kishi begins to lose appetite for whatever she might find on principle. "Cookies."
"Cookies?" Ari and Kishi echo in the same breath, Ari hopeful and Kishi incredulous.
Shaanxi looks sheepish, small nimble fingers flying to tuck her hair behind her ears like she always did when she was flustered. Then she broke the cookies in half and passed them around, so each of them had equal pieces of equal sizes, because she was Shaanxi Norman, eldest of four, big sister and protector. She talks the whole while, of nonesensical things, like the stain on their mother's Geodude-print oven mitts and what the orphanage from Saffron used to smell like compared to the scented plug-in that Amelia Norman always had around, and Kishi is fourteen and he hadn't even wanted to come on this adventure, but it felt awkward being the only one left at home and here he is, washed up on sharp, weather-beaten rocks with his Swampert, his sixteen-year-old sister, her Pelipper, his nine-year-old brother, and his nine-year-old brother’s Sealeo.
Nothing had ever tasted sweeter on his tongue than those stale cookies did in that moment.
He remembers baking them, bending his elbows and shoving at the dough with the rolling pin while his mother and Ari spread flour and sugar on each other and Shaanxi separated the chocolate chips from the peanut butter chips and measured them in the bright yellow measuring cup that still bore Zini's teeth marks from when she was five. The memory still rings with laughter and with love, and that's what he clings to while the sea roars for his blood beneath him.
-
His fingers went from one Pokeball to another, but the movement didn't make power and confidence flow through his veins like a Magikarp on a river, like it usually did. He felt small, futile, like he had on Mt. Pyre, watching Archie make off with the Blue Orb and being powerless to stop him.
The ground Earthquaked underneath his feet, and Shaanxi clutched at him and he clutched at her and they knelt together in the soft, springy grass of Sootopolis main, and until the day he dies he will hear the sound of Kyogre and Groudon lashing at each other, flat, glowing paws swiping and tails flailing and mouths gaping open with hate, and Kishi thought they looked a bit like Team Aqua and Team Magma when pitted against each other. Powerful, ancient, rooted, but so very, very stupid.
In the middle of it all, Ari spread his stick-thin arms and screamed, and the wind kicked at his mousey brown hair and sprayed mud on his tennis shoes and his shorts and wasn't Mom just going to hate that?
In the years to come, Kishi will look back on this moment and call it the catalyst of the whole series of events that caused his little brother's soul to go dark. He will look at the person Ari will become and he will blame this moment for how he turned out.
No child should be asked to rein a Rayquaza using only the power of his soul. No world should place its hope on the small, undeveloped shoulders of a nine-year-old.
Above them all, Rayquaza becalmed the land and the sea, and nobody except Kishi saw Ari quietly go supernova.
-
Shaanxi will die in her bed when she is eighty. Her husband, Ty the cameraman (but by then he will have been bumped up to international news and everyone will know his name before he retired) will be by her side, reading her the same Pokemon fairytales she used to read to their children. All her Pokemon will be there; her Machoke and her Pelipper and most of all, her trusted, beloved Sceptile that had been given to her as a mewling Treecko, fresh from the egg.
He will come to her, and she will trace each and every one of his scars with her fingers.
Then she will ask, "Do you think we made our parents proud?"
And he will know she is talking about their real parents, the ones who dropped them off at an orphanage in Saffron City without so much as a whoopsie-daisy. The ones they have to blame for her almond-shaped, wide-set eyes and smooth skin, and his froth of curls like individual streaks of charcoal across his dark forehead and his narrow feet.
Shaanxi never knew who her parents were.
Kishi had spent every waking moment trying to find his.
He had succeeded, the day he turned fifteen.
And because she was on her death bed, and by tomorrow they would be removing her body to take it back to the Mauville she loved so much and she will know everything, he lies through his teeth, "Of course we did."
-
Jasmine, his beautiful, loyal Swampert who had been given to him as a mewling Mudkip, fresh from the egg, rocks onto her hind legs and bellows her victory, mud oozing off the fins on her back.
Tabitha flings her arms up to protect herself, but Kishi signals to Jasmine to back off and she does.
"Who are you?" the long-limbed, freckled woman cries, terror clear as day in her voice, and every curl of red hair -- red as an Octillery with a fondness for tomatoes -- quivers as her bee-stung lips part and shape her words. "You've beaten me once, isn't that enough?"
Her name isn't really Tabitha. She had started signing it that shortly after her first career in Saffron City had gone belly-up. She came to Hoenn for a fresh start, to carve a new life for herself in a new land with new ambitions, leaving Giovanni, her parents, her siblings, and her infant son to struggle out of the hole she's helped make for them. Kishi tries not to draw too many parallels between this woman and Zini. Zini has the same, open, needy soul that Giovanni preys on, that will turn her into a creature like Tabitha, known back in Kanto as Molly Alfa.
Known here as simply "Hi, Mom," Kishi says, and his first real memory of his mother is the way her eyes just shattered.
-
Shaanxi finds him afterwards and gets on her knees in the dirt and hands him the last cookie. The one she had hid in her pocket while the world ended.
Cookies, he thinks, have it easy. They are nothing but calorie on calorie, packed into one, simple, unconditional message that he rolls over his tongue under the warmth spreads back down to his fingertips, hovering over the Pokeballs on his belt; I love you.
If there was one thing he could always count on, it was his sister's love; like the ocean, take a bucket and there will never be any less.
iii. Rock, Ice, Steel.
It was a Tuesday afternoon and Sarai Steel came into Saffron City on the 4:30 with her hair coiled into shining, silky ringlets at the base of her neck and her pockets filled with notes on the speech she will deliver later on Bayleef synthesis.
She's greeted by a dark-skinned man in a cardigan sweater that he has pulled over a regular, unprofessional t-shirt, but he has his collar arranged so it's hard to see and she wouldn't have noticed if she had been anybody but Sarai Steel, a chronic noticer by trade, and she doesn't honestly care because his smile is warm and his handshake warmer after she had spent the last hour holding on to a cold, slimy train support bar. After he offers her the usual pleasantries and politely inquires whether or not he could carry her briefcase, he confesses that he let his friend write her name on the sign he had been holding because he didn't trust his own handwriting.
When he stretches up onto his tip-toes to close the trunk, she tilts her head at him and says, "You used to be a Pokemon Trainer."
He looks at her, eyes sparking surprise, but he's quick to say, "And this isn't my natural hair color and I used to feed my peas to my mother's Elekid under the table. Wow. I'm glad I got that off my chest. How did you know?"
She points to his belt, finger carefully manicured and arcing and white. "Your belt doesn't hold up your pants, yet everything about the way you walk says you're so used to wearing one that it will feel weird if you're not. Ergo, Pokemon Trainer."
Admiration creeps into the corners of his mouth, where his smile begins. "Well, I don't know about you, but I think you're wasting your time on educational speeches on Bayleef synthesis, because you're absolutely right. I was a Pokemon Trainer." He opens the taxi door for her.
She slides in, awkward because she's only been in a car two or three times and it's hard to remember, sometimes, how it goes; left leg goes first, head ducks down and gravity does the rest, then pull in right leg when the door closes. Hard to pull off in nylons and high heels, harder still to do gracefully in a skirt cut like hers was. She lets her Pokeball slide into the dip between her thighs, one hand still cradling its shape protectively. She had worked too hard to obtain a Chikorita, and while she was certain a drop to the pavement wasn't going to undo that, she was still extremely protective.
"What happened?" she asks, and he arrests the door's closing momentum to look at her like no one had ever asked him that question before.
Then he smiles again. "I reached Saffron City. I couldn't bring myself to leave."
-
He drags his fry through the ketchup on his cheap paper plate and it bends limply under the weight. They're right out of the fryer, so his Adam's apple bulges when he swallows and it scorches a hot track down his throat, ketchup or no.
"Well," he says, drawing out the word so that it sounds like he's dwelled so long on this topic he could have sat down and written a thesis statement on it. "I know Goldenrod City has its automobiles here and there, but it's pretty much a feature unique to Saffron. Nature and Pokemon encroach on us less, so there's little to worry about that impediment. Outside the city walls, though, you either walk, bike, or ride a Pokemon. Most people are astonished and frightened when they come here and see ... a car."
"They're big and clunky," Sarai decides, unbuttoning the sleeves of her blouse and rolling them up to her elbows so she could reach across the steaming dumplings to spoon several meatballs onto her spaghetti.
"They are," he concedes. "When you compare them to the trains of Goldenrod and the pulley system they invented in central Hoenn. But they work for us here so we don't overwork our Pokemon."
"What made you give them up?" she asks, genuinely curious because she can't read the answer in him. She grabs a soda out of the bin and wipes the excess water off on her skirt.
"Give what up?" he goes around another fry.
"Pokemon. You said you couldn't bring yourself to leave Saffron City. But why give up battling?"
He's silent as they worm their way around the plastic tables to find an open spot next to the Seaking fountain and sit together on the stone. She folds one leg under her and he stretches his legs out in front of him. After a long while, he finally says, "My mom, I think. She had been so old when she had me, and she always used to beg me to stay close to home because she couldn't bare losing me. And while I was in Saffron... I met this girl named Copycat. Real quiet. Like, pathologically quiet. I stayed because she asked me to. And I've been here ever since. It's what I want. The open road is nice, but this is home."
She smiles, because he doesn't know just how alike they are, and while she less-than-artfully twirls her spaghetti onto her fork, she asks, "What's your name?"
"Lief. Lief Steel."
"I'm Sarai Steel."
"I know. I had your name on a sign, remember?"
"Is that why you chose me?"
He grins, sheepish, and suddenly, he's that much younger. "Yes. It's not a very common name, is it?"
"Do you think we're related?"
He laughs, and offers her a fry. She flicks a bit of spaghetti sauce at him in retaliation, and it splatters against the soft ivory knit of his cardigan, and there it sticks, looking eerily like blood. She thinks she must be dreaming when he just laughs again and says, "Now I know we're related."
-
"If you ask me, I have faith in the name Steel. Have you ever heard of Meiya Steel?"
She shakes her head, which hurts because her neck is stiff for reasons unknown to her. Her hands are feeling along the slope of the back of her head, looking for the clips that hold the loose strands up underneath the cascade of curls. When she has them removed, she slips them into her pocket, listening to them click together. She debates removing her tortoise-shell hairclip, but it's a bit too warm outside for that.
"Well," he goes, spreading his arms wide and moving one foot over the other along the curb, "Meiya Steel lived a couple generations before us, when Team Rocket had a terrorist regime up and running here in Saffron City. Stories say she lived a full and happy life somewhere down south -- Pallet Town; have you ever heard of it? Me neither -- and one day, without warning, she takes her children and leaves her husband and then she separates her kids and vanishes without a trace, only to turn up on the Champion roster. Nobody ever really saw it coming because she had always been so ambivalent towards Pokemon."
Her Bayleef pauses to inspect something small and green growing out of a crack in the sidewalk. "Do you think she's related to us?" Sarai asks.
Lief laughs, spinning on the curb to face her. "Are you kidding? You really haven't heard of Meiya Steel, have you? No. She's one of those tall, remote, icy blonde types who will knock your lights out if you say anything about it."
"Ah. Yes. We have one of those on our Elite Four in Hoenn. Her name's Glacia."
"Oh ho!" He steps back onto the sidewalk, blocking her path. "So you are a Pokemon Trainer."
"Was," she stresses, trying to walk around him, but he moves into her way again.
"Tell me about it. I've given you my life story," he points out.
"What are you, five?" she chides, shoving at his shoulders. "There isn't much to tell. Girl's single parent father makes a deal with a neighboring scientist to give her a Pokemon, girl takes to the Pokemon like a Remoraid to a Mantine and winds up going all over the world, becomes Champion, collects 200 Pokemon and gets a Chikorita as a gift from said scientist, and then she gets a job in an Rustboro office working nine to five. Anyone could have done it."
He looks at her, serious now, head tilted and eyes as soft as melted butter. "What, you never aimed for a complete Pokedex?"
"Where I come from, 200 was a complete Pokedex, country boy," she ducks under his arm, shedding her high heels to make it easier. Her Bayleef picks them up by the straps between his teeth and trots after her, pleased as could be. "You've got Pokemon here that I don't, I have Pokemon that you don't. We have some in common, like Pikachu and Machop, but for the most part, Hoenn is an entirely separate planet from Kanto."
"So why aren't you out catching them now?" he asks, following her at a jog. "If we've got so many Pokemon you don't?"
She rolls her eyes. "Pokemon catching is a kid's game. Something you do to fill up your teenage years and get used to a world with Pokemon before you get a job working for them."
He grabs her wrist suddenly, yanking her off the sidewalk and into the street. She yelps, dancing over a hot streak of pliable tar and then stepping lightly on the burning asphalt. He leads her right down the middle of the street, where her burning feet find relief along the solid yellow lines. His grip on her wrist loosens, and slides down so his hand tangles with hers. Her eyes meet his, and she thinks she understands suddenly, what rock stars meant when they talked about standing hand-in-hand under a midday sun, just falling in love.
"Do you believe in chemistry, Lief Steel?" she asks. Do you believe in love at first sight? is what she means.
He steps closer, his hip brushing hers through their clothes and she thinks her skin just melts against his. "I believe that like chemistry, Pokemon come in threes."
"Three possible starting Pokemon," she undoes the tortoiseshell hair clip and her black curls fall around her shoulders in a wave.
"Three generations between us and the invention of the Pokeball," he lets one lock of her hair coil around his fingertip.
"Three sets of legendary triads," she tilts her head up.
"Three birds," his head comes down.
"Three Regis," her lips hover inches from his.
"Three dogs," he breathes in every breath that she breathes out.
"Three possible sizes for Mag-a-ra-mar toilet paper," she whispers, and she feels his hold body convulse with laughter; his abs underneath her fingertips, his thighs against hers, his eyes and his face.
"Yes, Sarai Steel, I believe in chemistry," he murmurs, and then he kisses her.
-
She misses her train home.
She uses the money to buy a Trainer belt instead.
-
Two months later, he's given his notice and she sent her Swellow back to Rustboro to give hers, and they sit on a bench outside the Saffron City train station. Lief's slumped low in his seat and the fingers he has idling stroking along the notches in her Bayleef's spine are stilling. By the time the sun comes up, the softest spreads of orange along the windows of the Silph Co. skyscrapers, he's asleep.
Now, she thinks, would be a good time to tell him she loves him, loves him enough to spend the rest of her life with him.
But she has forever to tell him.
So Sarai curls up into the warmth of his body and closes her eyes. When she dreams, she dreams of Hoenn and victory and the way battle tasted in the back of her mouth and everything she ever loved that caused her to leap in and track Team Aqua's submarine when no one else would, and then she dreams of fire and pinpricks of blinding light and metal blowing towards her and glass falling around her in dazzling array like the fragments of a Regice, and he's beside her, like a rock, like he's been there her entire life.
-
Meiya's heels click on the linoleum.
Doors whish open softly before her. Mud-streaked mats muffle the sound of her footsteps, but only briefly. Her hair is perfectly coiled, perfectly blonde. Her eyes are perfectly dry. She is the epitome of control, of icy apathy. She is the woman who gave up a married life, two beautiful children, and a career in biological research, all because a Pokedex, the open road, and a pushy rival from childhood called to her. She is one of a scattered handful of people to have 386 Pokemon. She must never break down.
She is met half-way there by men in white coats, and they lead her the rest of the way. She barely hears their warnings; all she listens to is the click-click-click of her heels, an outward expression of an inner racing heart.
And then there they are in front of her on one bed. They're still curled around each other, hips pressed close and foreheads touching. The smaller, lighter girl has one hand curled underneath his cheek, and her lips are still smiling like children do in dreams.
"They were coming from the train station," one of the men tell her, slowly and carefully, as she lightly picks up a lock of Sarai's slick hair like it was a cigarette and tucks it behind her ear. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees the neighboring bed has a Bayleef spread out on its side; machines softly beeping around it. She strokes the line of Lief's ankle, before her hands move to dab gently at the blood splattered all over the soft ivory knit of his cardigan.
"They were coming from the train station," the man repeats. "She had a speech to deliver at the Silph Co. and he was her escort. They were hit just right down the street. The driver's upstairs in critical condition, but he managed to tell us enough about them. Your son and your daughter were dead on impact. I'm sorry."
"Why are they like this?" Meiya's voice says without her, and her wrist is delicate and feminine when she uses it to gesture to their intimate posture.
The man shifts uncomfortably. "At the speeds they were traveling, combined with the force they were hit and the fire... they kind of.. fused."
The second man in white catches her when her legs give out, because they do then. A chair is fetched and a Gloom is placed under her nose so its stench of smelling salts could revive her. Still, her ears are singing and all she can see is her children, burned onto the back of her eyelids.
She has never been a particularly spiritual woman, but never in her entire life has Meiya had more faith than she did in that moment. She believed in her son's dedication to his family and she believed in her daughter's dedication to her Pokemon because those were the two major part of herself.
She believed that if they had known each other, Lief Steel and Sarai Steel would have gotten along smashingly.
She believed it with a faith so overwhelming it choked her.
iv. Electric, Ground, Flying.
He strikes a match, and it strikes him that in some ways, he is jealous; fire Pokemon can combust flame out of ... nothing, out of their genes, it seems like, and here humans are, still forced to revert to crude phosphorus and the friction of sand paper, like lightning lashing out at a tree.
He watches the flame burn, and he hopes that a storm blows in out of nowhere and puts it out for him, because he doesn't think he has the strength anymore, not for this, not to take a deep breath and smother that flame, snuff it out when its life had barely begun to exist. Black crawls down the wood towards his fingers, and he holds on, and out of the corner of his eye he watches the skies, waiting for the tell-tale gathering of ash-grey clouds like smoke blown from a cigarette (because this is Hoenn, Kyogre's neighbor, so sudden storms are nothing new). Even when it reaches his fingertips, he lets it burn, let the black probe gingerly at the edges of his skin.
"Spenser."
He has become, he imagines, everything that made Gordor such a joke.
"Spenser."
He's ancient. Well, not old-crone false-teeth kind of ancient, but in the scheme of things, he had long ago been expected to put his Styler down.
Well, he had already done that, but that was besides the point.
His muscles don't answer him as well as they used to. Grey streaks down the hair that curls by his ears, giving him the misleading impression that he had wings growing out the side of his head. He feels old. He's tired. So very tired. Nobody had told him things were going to be this hard. This should be the age in which he is thinking about retiring, about finding some pleasantly remote place to build a cottage where he and his Fearow could tend a garden and entertain visitors on a wrap-around white porch with tall, frosting glasses of iced tea with condensation on the sides and pooling at the bottom.
He shouldn't still be trying to carve a life out of a granite mountainside, hoping that a new land could bury old secrets.
They did have a white picket fence, though. Irony should appreciate that.
"Spenser. Are you listening to me? My water broke."
She sounds as tired as he is, like she's given up trying to care, and the moment he knew this was the moment he started giving up as well, because Marina was the last person who'd back down from a challenge and when she threw the towel in like a strike of lightning was a sign for everyone everywhere to just lay down and die.
They couldn't, though. They had their house here, in Fallabor Town, her radio show, and their Ranger network, flitting on his Fearow's wings from them here to Catherine and Jackson in Fortree to Lunick and his beautiful, purple-haired wife in Ringtown to Ingrid at the Rock Tunnel and Morty and his gang in Erukteak. And somewhere, somewhere in the world, they have Korea.
Who, he cannot stop himself from thinking, was their trial run.
He's old. He's twice Marina's age and he won't be there to watch their child get married, just like he never saw Lunick take over the Ringtown Ranger Base after him and he never will see what becomes of his first daughter.
He's old, but he doesn't think he's old enough to stop making promises.
He promises himself that he won't make the same mistakes this time. This child will have his DNA, defective and prone to self-destruction as it was, but that doesn't make him or her a Ranger. It doesn't even mean she'll like Pokemon. He promises he won't make the error of thinking that she will be him. He will put her firmly on the ground and let her run where she wants to run without putting her head in the clouds. He promises that Fallabar Town, Hoenn isn't the end of the world and he's not done traveling. He has yet to persuade Deoxys of friendship, after all.
He's not done.
"Spenser!" the ending syllable of his name falls out and then up into a moan of pain, and he hears her weight slump against the door frame.
And she's still here with him. Or he's still here with her. He's not sure which is which.
He wants to touch her, suddenly. He needs to touch her. He doesn't know why he ever stopped.
The match hisses at it hits the grass and his knees creak when he gets up, and her eyes -- red like Joel's blood -- flash up to him when he comes to stand by her side, his Fearow by his and her Plusle by hers. Her hands hang in front of her belly, small and pale-looking next to the heavy, swollen weight of their unborn child, but he has seen those hands tame creatures capable of bringing mountains to their knees. He has seen those hands, those fingertips, brush over his best friend's eyes so they closed.
He hopes things will work out better this time around.
She gasps abruptly and clutches at his arm, face creasing with agony, but he can't erase the way she looked at him just then, eyes sparking with hope, with love, and with an overwhelming faith -- the sacred trinity that every Pokemon Trainer (Ranger) must possess, that bridges the world between them and the Pokemon they vow to spend the rest of their lives with.
This is the first time he's felt much of anything since he watched them lower Joel into the ground.
Fandom: Pokemon (Anna gameverse) -- all 3rd generation games, Ranger
Word Count: 7142
i. Fire. Grass. Water.
Korea Black was one year, two hundred and seventy days old when she fell in love for the first time.
She likes to think she set a record. She certainly couldn't say she had been aware she was falling in love while it had been happening; even now, the idea is still a little bit abstract, floating just outside her consciousness like a Hoppip on a spring breeze. She understands the concept, of course, but seeing as she never expected to run into it herself at any point, she hadn't spent her formative years studying very hard on the subject of love, re: falling in.
It must be skeptically remarked upon -- and Korea is nothing if she is not a skeptic -- that how could she fall in love at such a tender age, when love is a delicacy reserved only for the long legs and hunched shoulders of the curdled, pasteurized teenage years. Indeed, she doesn't remember the occurrence very well; only vague shapes and the memory of a face, of a voice, and even now, the feel of it passing over her mind is not unlike that of a favorite blanket or the touch of a beloved's Pokemon.
She flows back to that memory the way she does to particular rooms in this house they built; a day and a half's walk from the main road and about forty minutes from the northern fence of the Safari Zone, where Girafarig came to the cross-hatched wire to sniff at her fingers. She hides in the laundry room, perched on top of the dryer, letting it warm the bottom of her thighs while the sun, slanting harsh and beautiful through the Venetian blinds warmed the tops. When that's not enough, she wraps herself in the memory, patchy as it was; she remembers how tense the muscles in Spenser's stomach were against her back as clear as she remembers the smell of Hiro Alfa's house, a strange mix of cinnamon and baby powder, and the unmistakable tang of Pokemon Trainers. She remembers a boy, Hiro's son, two years, two hundred and seventy days old, removing his toothbrush from his mouth and sticking it in hers.
He doesn't share his toothbrush with her anymore, but when Chance Alfa carelessly lets his thigh brush against hers under the table, she loses all train of thought (and for some reason she can't fathom, she thinks this helps her reach an understanding.)
-
Korea would like to state, first and foremost, that she cares nothing for Pokemon. They exist; as long as they tolerate her being in their world, she will tolerate them being in hers. She has no wish to become a Trainer (or a Ranger) and she thinks the idea of there being some deep, psychological connection between Pokemon and humans is ridiculous.
Both of them are empathetic creatures in an apathetic world.
"I don't know. It seems so ... big," she says faintly, letting her wrist flip pathetically as if she couldn't bring herself to make a grander gesture, for all its futility.
Behind her, Maxie grunts, and as usual she can't tell if he's agreeing with her or making fun of her or if he genuinely had something stuck in his throat.
"Legendary Pokemon tend to be, yes," Chance goes wryly, and the next second, he lurches off his Altaria and goes sprinting down the front path, hollering and waving his arms. "Loki! Loki, you dumb, blundering Groudon, get away from my baby's breath!"
She watches him, and even she cannot help but admire the immediate way his Swampert leaps to the smallest shift in his physical presence, how one hand brushing his brown-streaked green hair out of his eyes can mean the difference between his Cacturne lurching into battle or hanging back and letting the Swampert handle it. If she ever came to believe in the connection between people and Pokemon, the flawless way Chance and his team move around each other like Roselia to a trellis would be the leading factor in her conversion.
This man had taken her heart, as brambly and thorny as it was, and stuck it in the middle of the sunlight and here she was, and she needs him like she needs the ebb and flow of her memory.
The Groudon backs off, and Chance turns to her, eyes the same green-yellow of a spring storm, and when he smiles, it's a smile that's just for her, only for her, and she doesn't think there are words to do justice to just how much that means to her.
-
She knows how Maxie looks at her. Like he's sizing her up for something, or like he's calculating just how many ways he can make her crash and burn.
And that's what Maxie is. He's fire and passion. He's dangerous; he's somebody whose face her mother would put on child molestors and 'never take candy from someone who looks like this.'
But Maxie's already tried to destroy the world once (granted, he only had the good of Hoenn in his heart, but what was that saying about the path to hell?) and Korea Black hasn't seen her mother since she was five years old, and that's a story she doesn't particularly want to tell anyone. She thinks Chance knows, but only because his father, Wally, married Korea's sister, Kenya, and when things like that happen, all of a family's bad blood is exposed.
"I couldn't care less," Chance had said flatly when they heard the news. "Love is love is love. I don't judge." Then he had thrown his head back and laughed and laughed and laughed and she didn't want to breathe ever again.
Korea doesn't know whether Chance invited her to come live with him out here because he was obliged to because she was related to him now (well, she always was, but it was cousins once removed kind of thing), or because he loved her, and it hurts more than she thinks it should. (She bets, however, that he did it because she knows this land; she grew up here, in the deepest mountains of Hoenn with Spenser and Aunt Marina and Catherine and Jackson and all the Rangers.)
She hops up onto the island in the middle of the kitchen with its pots and pans swinging from their hooks above her head. She moves a leftover cereal bowl out of the way with her left hand and a sleepy Chimecho away with her right. Her eyes, the same, flashy silver of alloy metal, flicker around the plain, straight-from-a-magazine kitchen design and light upon the small touches that makes it their home like the wings of a Butterfree would touch its prey -- the piled-up dishes, the instant mashed potatoes, Maxie's Mightyena curled up right in the middle of the doorway so it controls all the traffic in and out, its delicate feet twitching in some dream, and Maxie himself, who is perhaps the strangest addition to any household and certainly never came from a magazine.
She thinks of the way Chance's face lights up whenever he's around, and the rings around her ribs tighten just a little bit more.
Maxie still thinks she's competition; he hasn't the faintest idea that she dropped out of the running the moment he turned up on their doorstep, like so many things do in her family.
Still.
Korea Black has never apologized for anything before in her life.
-
She keeps the walk swept smooth, even though there is no paved sidewalk or even much of a porch, because their closest neighbors live more than ten minutes away by Altaria (which is a day and a half's walk).
She thinks the only reason why she takes a broom to that patch of dirt outside their front door every morning is because it's the only way she can feel in charge of their backyard. Which, let's face it, extends on forever. She has no control over the never-ending forest around her; nobody does.
Whoever built Fortree understood it perfectly.
(Also, but this is something she'll never admit out loud, she comes out here and tackles the dirt with a broom because Chance and Maxie are more prone to shows of affection early in the morning, as if making a cup of coffee or rinsing out their breakfast bowls will put up a barrier between them for the rest of the day -- but before that, their lips are free to touch as often as they like, sometimes almost gentle, like lovers, but more often fiercer, like a battle, like one blames the other for where they are, stuck in the middle of nowhere with her.)
So comes the day when she fights the bag of Mightyena food for the broom in the pantry, and she undoes the iron-inlaid locks on the front door with Chance's Minun hanging from her shoulder and swings it open and near about trips over the little red-headed girl sitting on the front dirt with a Pineco-jelly sandwich sticky between her palms.
"Oh. Hello," she says, letting the broom fall to her side where its abused tail catches on the ground and causes it to stand on its own power. The Minun transfers to the other shoulder.
"Hello," the little girl replies, looking at her with eyes the same, flashy silver of metal alloy.
"Who are you?"
"My name is Phoenix. And you're my aunt Korea and you," she looks past her. "Are my brother Chance."
"Hello, little half sister," goes Chance's voice from behind her, sounding jovial and merry because that's how he always sounds, and Korea watches the light come to this little girl's eyes and she wonders how long it will take her to fall in love too. "Did Dad send you here to check on us?"
"No," says Phoenix in that unabashed, honest way of a child. "Your mom and your mom sent me to learn Pokemon from you."
He takes on a bemused tone. "My mother, Hiro Alfa? But she's a Pokemon Master. That's why Dad divorced her and that's why I live out here; I don't want my life to be half the publicity storm hers is. And Marina --" Korea doesn't bother to correct him; what was there to say? Marina isn't actually my mom, she's just the woman who kidnapped me from a home that couldn't love me and taught me everything I know while living hand to mouth in the mountains, while my actual parents are Susanna Alfa and Lance Black of the Elite Four and have only bothered to track me down once and at the same time were raising your dad’s new wife like a little loving family? Mm. No. "-- is a well-renowned Pokemon expert with her own radio show now. Why couldn't they teach you?"
Pheonix shrugs. "They say I have more to teach you than you have to teach me."
"Let me tell you something your uncle Zach taught me," Marina's memory tells her, and Korea is taken back to the ghostly campfires of her youth, her pudgy hands meeting her aunt's in some feeble rendition of patty-cake. "You can be whatever you want to be -- you might think you're destined to be a rock star, but you might wind up a teacher or an artist, and you can do the most amazing things, whatever you decide. But let me tell you this; none of that, none of that compares to the importance of a child's life. You can cure cancer, but if you do not raise your children to be good, and strong, then it means nothing. Do you understand me, Korea? There is no higher responsibility than that of raising a child."
"Would you like something to drink, Phoenix?" she hears herself ask. "We have some apple juice."
The girl shakes her head, her red ringlets flying, the exact same shade of red -- like an Octillery with a fondness for tomatoes -- that Korea had, that Kenya had, that Susanna had and Susanna's father Xavier, patron of the Alfa family, had. "I like orange juice."
"Well, we don't have any of that. But we have a whole forest of orange trees around us, so we can go picking for some the moment you're ready. And if we ask nicely, perhaps Maxie's Camerupt will come with us."
The girl seems to think this over, finishing her sandwich -- except the crust -- in the time it takes her to decide whether she's going to cooperate. But then she makes one huge nod of her head and bounces to her feet.
The broom stands on its own. Korea stands at its side, and Chance stands at hers.
"I love you," he says suddenly, watching the timid but bright-eyed, eager, curious way that Phoenix introduced herself to Maxie's Camerupt while its Trainer looked on, bleary-eyed from sleep and rather confused. She feels his fingers, brushing against her shoulder blades as he gingerly detaches Olivia the Minun's claws from her clothing. "I don't think I ever told you."
She looks up at him through the fan of her eyelashes, and there's a loose feeling in her chest like a whole bucket of water had suddenly gotten loose, and hope sloshes up against her ribs.
ii. Psychic, Dark, Fighting.
"You're clueless as to where you are, aren't you?" the Aqua Grunt tossed her Pokeball from one hand to another like a drunk man would his knife at a bar fight, all flash and raw talent. "Fluster out the enemy, then lower the boom! That's our plan."
"Really?" Kishi grinned, lips peeling back like flakes of sunburned skin from dark cinnamon shoulders, fingers expertly removing his Grumpig's Pokeball from his belt. "I'm just touched that we present that much of a threat to you." And, laughing at the expression on her face, which told him everything like he could read her mind, he threw the Pokeball.
-
Later, they cling to the chalky white rock at the base of the Sootopolis mountain, and there's a whole story about how they got there, but it's one of those kinds of stories that only really gets told by eyewitnesses and they usually get it wrong anyway.
"I don't suppose anyone has any food," Kishi asks, planting his feet into the crystal and shifting a little bit so that the blood could flow back to his butt. He has decided, in the past forty-eight hours, that he really is a land-favoring kind of man. What he wouldn't give to be back in Lavaridge Town, with a desert just a day's walk away and not a concern in the world but training his team. He was happy there, him and his Swampert and his Flygon; the desert didn't bother them; it was just wind and sand and heartless sun.
The sea was its sister, and he hated it most passionately.
Ari shakes his head no.
"I have ..." Shaanxi pulled her bag onto her rock with her from where it had been dangerously close to the approaching tide, and she digs so far deep down that Kishi begins to lose appetite for whatever she might find on principle. "Cookies."
"Cookies?" Ari and Kishi echo in the same breath, Ari hopeful and Kishi incredulous.
Shaanxi looks sheepish, small nimble fingers flying to tuck her hair behind her ears like she always did when she was flustered. Then she broke the cookies in half and passed them around, so each of them had equal pieces of equal sizes, because she was Shaanxi Norman, eldest of four, big sister and protector. She talks the whole while, of nonesensical things, like the stain on their mother's Geodude-print oven mitts and what the orphanage from Saffron used to smell like compared to the scented plug-in that Amelia Norman always had around, and Kishi is fourteen and he hadn't even wanted to come on this adventure, but it felt awkward being the only one left at home and here he is, washed up on sharp, weather-beaten rocks with his Swampert, his sixteen-year-old sister, her Pelipper, his nine-year-old brother, and his nine-year-old brother’s Sealeo.
Nothing had ever tasted sweeter on his tongue than those stale cookies did in that moment.
He remembers baking them, bending his elbows and shoving at the dough with the rolling pin while his mother and Ari spread flour and sugar on each other and Shaanxi separated the chocolate chips from the peanut butter chips and measured them in the bright yellow measuring cup that still bore Zini's teeth marks from when she was five. The memory still rings with laughter and with love, and that's what he clings to while the sea roars for his blood beneath him.
-
His fingers went from one Pokeball to another, but the movement didn't make power and confidence flow through his veins like a Magikarp on a river, like it usually did. He felt small, futile, like he had on Mt. Pyre, watching Archie make off with the Blue Orb and being powerless to stop him.
The ground Earthquaked underneath his feet, and Shaanxi clutched at him and he clutched at her and they knelt together in the soft, springy grass of Sootopolis main, and until the day he dies he will hear the sound of Kyogre and Groudon lashing at each other, flat, glowing paws swiping and tails flailing and mouths gaping open with hate, and Kishi thought they looked a bit like Team Aqua and Team Magma when pitted against each other. Powerful, ancient, rooted, but so very, very stupid.
In the middle of it all, Ari spread his stick-thin arms and screamed, and the wind kicked at his mousey brown hair and sprayed mud on his tennis shoes and his shorts and wasn't Mom just going to hate that?
In the years to come, Kishi will look back on this moment and call it the catalyst of the whole series of events that caused his little brother's soul to go dark. He will look at the person Ari will become and he will blame this moment for how he turned out.
No child should be asked to rein a Rayquaza using only the power of his soul. No world should place its hope on the small, undeveloped shoulders of a nine-year-old.
Above them all, Rayquaza becalmed the land and the sea, and nobody except Kishi saw Ari quietly go supernova.
-
Shaanxi will die in her bed when she is eighty. Her husband, Ty the cameraman (but by then he will have been bumped up to international news and everyone will know his name before he retired) will be by her side, reading her the same Pokemon fairytales she used to read to their children. All her Pokemon will be there; her Machoke and her Pelipper and most of all, her trusted, beloved Sceptile that had been given to her as a mewling Treecko, fresh from the egg.
He will come to her, and she will trace each and every one of his scars with her fingers.
Then she will ask, "Do you think we made our parents proud?"
And he will know she is talking about their real parents, the ones who dropped them off at an orphanage in Saffron City without so much as a whoopsie-daisy. The ones they have to blame for her almond-shaped, wide-set eyes and smooth skin, and his froth of curls like individual streaks of charcoal across his dark forehead and his narrow feet.
Shaanxi never knew who her parents were.
Kishi had spent every waking moment trying to find his.
He had succeeded, the day he turned fifteen.
And because she was on her death bed, and by tomorrow they would be removing her body to take it back to the Mauville she loved so much and she will know everything, he lies through his teeth, "Of course we did."
-
Jasmine, his beautiful, loyal Swampert who had been given to him as a mewling Mudkip, fresh from the egg, rocks onto her hind legs and bellows her victory, mud oozing off the fins on her back.
Tabitha flings her arms up to protect herself, but Kishi signals to Jasmine to back off and she does.
"Who are you?" the long-limbed, freckled woman cries, terror clear as day in her voice, and every curl of red hair -- red as an Octillery with a fondness for tomatoes -- quivers as her bee-stung lips part and shape her words. "You've beaten me once, isn't that enough?"
Her name isn't really Tabitha. She had started signing it that shortly after her first career in Saffron City had gone belly-up. She came to Hoenn for a fresh start, to carve a new life for herself in a new land with new ambitions, leaving Giovanni, her parents, her siblings, and her infant son to struggle out of the hole she's helped make for them. Kishi tries not to draw too many parallels between this woman and Zini. Zini has the same, open, needy soul that Giovanni preys on, that will turn her into a creature like Tabitha, known back in Kanto as Molly Alfa.
Known here as simply "Hi, Mom," Kishi says, and his first real memory of his mother is the way her eyes just shattered.
-
Shaanxi finds him afterwards and gets on her knees in the dirt and hands him the last cookie. The one she had hid in her pocket while the world ended.
Cookies, he thinks, have it easy. They are nothing but calorie on calorie, packed into one, simple, unconditional message that he rolls over his tongue under the warmth spreads back down to his fingertips, hovering over the Pokeballs on his belt; I love you.
If there was one thing he could always count on, it was his sister's love; like the ocean, take a bucket and there will never be any less.
iii. Rock, Ice, Steel.
It was a Tuesday afternoon and Sarai Steel came into Saffron City on the 4:30 with her hair coiled into shining, silky ringlets at the base of her neck and her pockets filled with notes on the speech she will deliver later on Bayleef synthesis.
She's greeted by a dark-skinned man in a cardigan sweater that he has pulled over a regular, unprofessional t-shirt, but he has his collar arranged so it's hard to see and she wouldn't have noticed if she had been anybody but Sarai Steel, a chronic noticer by trade, and she doesn't honestly care because his smile is warm and his handshake warmer after she had spent the last hour holding on to a cold, slimy train support bar. After he offers her the usual pleasantries and politely inquires whether or not he could carry her briefcase, he confesses that he let his friend write her name on the sign he had been holding because he didn't trust his own handwriting.
When he stretches up onto his tip-toes to close the trunk, she tilts her head at him and says, "You used to be a Pokemon Trainer."
He looks at her, eyes sparking surprise, but he's quick to say, "And this isn't my natural hair color and I used to feed my peas to my mother's Elekid under the table. Wow. I'm glad I got that off my chest. How did you know?"
She points to his belt, finger carefully manicured and arcing and white. "Your belt doesn't hold up your pants, yet everything about the way you walk says you're so used to wearing one that it will feel weird if you're not. Ergo, Pokemon Trainer."
Admiration creeps into the corners of his mouth, where his smile begins. "Well, I don't know about you, but I think you're wasting your time on educational speeches on Bayleef synthesis, because you're absolutely right. I was a Pokemon Trainer." He opens the taxi door for her.
She slides in, awkward because she's only been in a car two or three times and it's hard to remember, sometimes, how it goes; left leg goes first, head ducks down and gravity does the rest, then pull in right leg when the door closes. Hard to pull off in nylons and high heels, harder still to do gracefully in a skirt cut like hers was. She lets her Pokeball slide into the dip between her thighs, one hand still cradling its shape protectively. She had worked too hard to obtain a Chikorita, and while she was certain a drop to the pavement wasn't going to undo that, she was still extremely protective.
"What happened?" she asks, and he arrests the door's closing momentum to look at her like no one had ever asked him that question before.
Then he smiles again. "I reached Saffron City. I couldn't bring myself to leave."
-
He drags his fry through the ketchup on his cheap paper plate and it bends limply under the weight. They're right out of the fryer, so his Adam's apple bulges when he swallows and it scorches a hot track down his throat, ketchup or no.
"Well," he says, drawing out the word so that it sounds like he's dwelled so long on this topic he could have sat down and written a thesis statement on it. "I know Goldenrod City has its automobiles here and there, but it's pretty much a feature unique to Saffron. Nature and Pokemon encroach on us less, so there's little to worry about that impediment. Outside the city walls, though, you either walk, bike, or ride a Pokemon. Most people are astonished and frightened when they come here and see ... a car."
"They're big and clunky," Sarai decides, unbuttoning the sleeves of her blouse and rolling them up to her elbows so she could reach across the steaming dumplings to spoon several meatballs onto her spaghetti.
"They are," he concedes. "When you compare them to the trains of Goldenrod and the pulley system they invented in central Hoenn. But they work for us here so we don't overwork our Pokemon."
"What made you give them up?" she asks, genuinely curious because she can't read the answer in him. She grabs a soda out of the bin and wipes the excess water off on her skirt.
"Give what up?" he goes around another fry.
"Pokemon. You said you couldn't bring yourself to leave Saffron City. But why give up battling?"
He's silent as they worm their way around the plastic tables to find an open spot next to the Seaking fountain and sit together on the stone. She folds one leg under her and he stretches his legs out in front of him. After a long while, he finally says, "My mom, I think. She had been so old when she had me, and she always used to beg me to stay close to home because she couldn't bare losing me. And while I was in Saffron... I met this girl named Copycat. Real quiet. Like, pathologically quiet. I stayed because she asked me to. And I've been here ever since. It's what I want. The open road is nice, but this is home."
She smiles, because he doesn't know just how alike they are, and while she less-than-artfully twirls her spaghetti onto her fork, she asks, "What's your name?"
"Lief. Lief Steel."
"I'm Sarai Steel."
"I know. I had your name on a sign, remember?"
"Is that why you chose me?"
He grins, sheepish, and suddenly, he's that much younger. "Yes. It's not a very common name, is it?"
"Do you think we're related?"
He laughs, and offers her a fry. She flicks a bit of spaghetti sauce at him in retaliation, and it splatters against the soft ivory knit of his cardigan, and there it sticks, looking eerily like blood. She thinks she must be dreaming when he just laughs again and says, "Now I know we're related."
-
"If you ask me, I have faith in the name Steel. Have you ever heard of Meiya Steel?"
She shakes her head, which hurts because her neck is stiff for reasons unknown to her. Her hands are feeling along the slope of the back of her head, looking for the clips that hold the loose strands up underneath the cascade of curls. When she has them removed, she slips them into her pocket, listening to them click together. She debates removing her tortoise-shell hairclip, but it's a bit too warm outside for that.
"Well," he goes, spreading his arms wide and moving one foot over the other along the curb, "Meiya Steel lived a couple generations before us, when Team Rocket had a terrorist regime up and running here in Saffron City. Stories say she lived a full and happy life somewhere down south -- Pallet Town; have you ever heard of it? Me neither -- and one day, without warning, she takes her children and leaves her husband and then she separates her kids and vanishes without a trace, only to turn up on the Champion roster. Nobody ever really saw it coming because she had always been so ambivalent towards Pokemon."
Her Bayleef pauses to inspect something small and green growing out of a crack in the sidewalk. "Do you think she's related to us?" Sarai asks.
Lief laughs, spinning on the curb to face her. "Are you kidding? You really haven't heard of Meiya Steel, have you? No. She's one of those tall, remote, icy blonde types who will knock your lights out if you say anything about it."
"Ah. Yes. We have one of those on our Elite Four in Hoenn. Her name's Glacia."
"Oh ho!" He steps back onto the sidewalk, blocking her path. "So you are a Pokemon Trainer."
"Was," she stresses, trying to walk around him, but he moves into her way again.
"Tell me about it. I've given you my life story," he points out.
"What are you, five?" she chides, shoving at his shoulders. "There isn't much to tell. Girl's single parent father makes a deal with a neighboring scientist to give her a Pokemon, girl takes to the Pokemon like a Remoraid to a Mantine and winds up going all over the world, becomes Champion, collects 200 Pokemon and gets a Chikorita as a gift from said scientist, and then she gets a job in an Rustboro office working nine to five. Anyone could have done it."
He looks at her, serious now, head tilted and eyes as soft as melted butter. "What, you never aimed for a complete Pokedex?"
"Where I come from, 200 was a complete Pokedex, country boy," she ducks under his arm, shedding her high heels to make it easier. Her Bayleef picks them up by the straps between his teeth and trots after her, pleased as could be. "You've got Pokemon here that I don't, I have Pokemon that you don't. We have some in common, like Pikachu and Machop, but for the most part, Hoenn is an entirely separate planet from Kanto."
"So why aren't you out catching them now?" he asks, following her at a jog. "If we've got so many Pokemon you don't?"
She rolls her eyes. "Pokemon catching is a kid's game. Something you do to fill up your teenage years and get used to a world with Pokemon before you get a job working for them."
He grabs her wrist suddenly, yanking her off the sidewalk and into the street. She yelps, dancing over a hot streak of pliable tar and then stepping lightly on the burning asphalt. He leads her right down the middle of the street, where her burning feet find relief along the solid yellow lines. His grip on her wrist loosens, and slides down so his hand tangles with hers. Her eyes meet his, and she thinks she understands suddenly, what rock stars meant when they talked about standing hand-in-hand under a midday sun, just falling in love.
"Do you believe in chemistry, Lief Steel?" she asks. Do you believe in love at first sight? is what she means.
He steps closer, his hip brushing hers through their clothes and she thinks her skin just melts against his. "I believe that like chemistry, Pokemon come in threes."
"Three possible starting Pokemon," she undoes the tortoiseshell hair clip and her black curls fall around her shoulders in a wave.
"Three generations between us and the invention of the Pokeball," he lets one lock of her hair coil around his fingertip.
"Three sets of legendary triads," she tilts her head up.
"Three birds," his head comes down.
"Three Regis," her lips hover inches from his.
"Three dogs," he breathes in every breath that she breathes out.
"Three possible sizes for Mag-a-ra-mar toilet paper," she whispers, and she feels his hold body convulse with laughter; his abs underneath her fingertips, his thighs against hers, his eyes and his face.
"Yes, Sarai Steel, I believe in chemistry," he murmurs, and then he kisses her.
-
She misses her train home.
She uses the money to buy a Trainer belt instead.
-
Two months later, he's given his notice and she sent her Swellow back to Rustboro to give hers, and they sit on a bench outside the Saffron City train station. Lief's slumped low in his seat and the fingers he has idling stroking along the notches in her Bayleef's spine are stilling. By the time the sun comes up, the softest spreads of orange along the windows of the Silph Co. skyscrapers, he's asleep.
Now, she thinks, would be a good time to tell him she loves him, loves him enough to spend the rest of her life with him.
But she has forever to tell him.
So Sarai curls up into the warmth of his body and closes her eyes. When she dreams, she dreams of Hoenn and victory and the way battle tasted in the back of her mouth and everything she ever loved that caused her to leap in and track Team Aqua's submarine when no one else would, and then she dreams of fire and pinpricks of blinding light and metal blowing towards her and glass falling around her in dazzling array like the fragments of a Regice, and he's beside her, like a rock, like he's been there her entire life.
-
Meiya's heels click on the linoleum.
Doors whish open softly before her. Mud-streaked mats muffle the sound of her footsteps, but only briefly. Her hair is perfectly coiled, perfectly blonde. Her eyes are perfectly dry. She is the epitome of control, of icy apathy. She is the woman who gave up a married life, two beautiful children, and a career in biological research, all because a Pokedex, the open road, and a pushy rival from childhood called to her. She is one of a scattered handful of people to have 386 Pokemon. She must never break down.
She is met half-way there by men in white coats, and they lead her the rest of the way. She barely hears their warnings; all she listens to is the click-click-click of her heels, an outward expression of an inner racing heart.
And then there they are in front of her on one bed. They're still curled around each other, hips pressed close and foreheads touching. The smaller, lighter girl has one hand curled underneath his cheek, and her lips are still smiling like children do in dreams.
"They were coming from the train station," one of the men tell her, slowly and carefully, as she lightly picks up a lock of Sarai's slick hair like it was a cigarette and tucks it behind her ear. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees the neighboring bed has a Bayleef spread out on its side; machines softly beeping around it. She strokes the line of Lief's ankle, before her hands move to dab gently at the blood splattered all over the soft ivory knit of his cardigan.
"They were coming from the train station," the man repeats. "She had a speech to deliver at the Silph Co. and he was her escort. They were hit just right down the street. The driver's upstairs in critical condition, but he managed to tell us enough about them. Your son and your daughter were dead on impact. I'm sorry."
"Why are they like this?" Meiya's voice says without her, and her wrist is delicate and feminine when she uses it to gesture to their intimate posture.
The man shifts uncomfortably. "At the speeds they were traveling, combined with the force they were hit and the fire... they kind of.. fused."
The second man in white catches her when her legs give out, because they do then. A chair is fetched and a Gloom is placed under her nose so its stench of smelling salts could revive her. Still, her ears are singing and all she can see is her children, burned onto the back of her eyelids.
She has never been a particularly spiritual woman, but never in her entire life has Meiya had more faith than she did in that moment. She believed in her son's dedication to his family and she believed in her daughter's dedication to her Pokemon because those were the two major part of herself.
She believed that if they had known each other, Lief Steel and Sarai Steel would have gotten along smashingly.
She believed it with a faith so overwhelming it choked her.
iv. Electric, Ground, Flying.
He strikes a match, and it strikes him that in some ways, he is jealous; fire Pokemon can combust flame out of ... nothing, out of their genes, it seems like, and here humans are, still forced to revert to crude phosphorus and the friction of sand paper, like lightning lashing out at a tree.
He watches the flame burn, and he hopes that a storm blows in out of nowhere and puts it out for him, because he doesn't think he has the strength anymore, not for this, not to take a deep breath and smother that flame, snuff it out when its life had barely begun to exist. Black crawls down the wood towards his fingers, and he holds on, and out of the corner of his eye he watches the skies, waiting for the tell-tale gathering of ash-grey clouds like smoke blown from a cigarette (because this is Hoenn, Kyogre's neighbor, so sudden storms are nothing new). Even when it reaches his fingertips, he lets it burn, let the black probe gingerly at the edges of his skin.
"Spenser."
He has become, he imagines, everything that made Gordor such a joke.
"Spenser."
He's ancient. Well, not old-crone false-teeth kind of ancient, but in the scheme of things, he had long ago been expected to put his Styler down.
Well, he had already done that, but that was besides the point.
His muscles don't answer him as well as they used to. Grey streaks down the hair that curls by his ears, giving him the misleading impression that he had wings growing out the side of his head. He feels old. He's tired. So very tired. Nobody had told him things were going to be this hard. This should be the age in which he is thinking about retiring, about finding some pleasantly remote place to build a cottage where he and his Fearow could tend a garden and entertain visitors on a wrap-around white porch with tall, frosting glasses of iced tea with condensation on the sides and pooling at the bottom.
He shouldn't still be trying to carve a life out of a granite mountainside, hoping that a new land could bury old secrets.
They did have a white picket fence, though. Irony should appreciate that.
"Spenser. Are you listening to me? My water broke."
She sounds as tired as he is, like she's given up trying to care, and the moment he knew this was the moment he started giving up as well, because Marina was the last person who'd back down from a challenge and when she threw the towel in like a strike of lightning was a sign for everyone everywhere to just lay down and die.
They couldn't, though. They had their house here, in Fallabor Town, her radio show, and their Ranger network, flitting on his Fearow's wings from them here to Catherine and Jackson in Fortree to Lunick and his beautiful, purple-haired wife in Ringtown to Ingrid at the Rock Tunnel and Morty and his gang in Erukteak. And somewhere, somewhere in the world, they have Korea.
Who, he cannot stop himself from thinking, was their trial run.
He's old. He's twice Marina's age and he won't be there to watch their child get married, just like he never saw Lunick take over the Ringtown Ranger Base after him and he never will see what becomes of his first daughter.
He's old, but he doesn't think he's old enough to stop making promises.
He promises himself that he won't make the same mistakes this time. This child will have his DNA, defective and prone to self-destruction as it was, but that doesn't make him or her a Ranger. It doesn't even mean she'll like Pokemon. He promises he won't make the error of thinking that she will be him. He will put her firmly on the ground and let her run where she wants to run without putting her head in the clouds. He promises that Fallabar Town, Hoenn isn't the end of the world and he's not done traveling. He has yet to persuade Deoxys of friendship, after all.
He's not done.
"Spenser!" the ending syllable of his name falls out and then up into a moan of pain, and he hears her weight slump against the door frame.
And she's still here with him. Or he's still here with her. He's not sure which is which.
He wants to touch her, suddenly. He needs to touch her. He doesn't know why he ever stopped.
The match hisses at it hits the grass and his knees creak when he gets up, and her eyes -- red like Joel's blood -- flash up to him when he comes to stand by her side, his Fearow by his and her Plusle by hers. Her hands hang in front of her belly, small and pale-looking next to the heavy, swollen weight of their unborn child, but he has seen those hands tame creatures capable of bringing mountains to their knees. He has seen those hands, those fingertips, brush over his best friend's eyes so they closed.
He hopes things will work out better this time around.
She gasps abruptly and clutches at his arm, face creasing with agony, but he can't erase the way she looked at him just then, eyes sparking with hope, with love, and with an overwhelming faith -- the sacred trinity that every Pokemon Trainer (Ranger) must possess, that bridges the world between them and the Pokemon they vow to spend the rest of their lives with.
This is the first time he's felt much of anything since he watched them lower Joel into the ground.